Atonement, dir Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley,
James McAvoy, Vanessa Redgrave

The film of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement summons up
many literary antecedents, such as L.P.Hartley’s The
Go-Between or D.H.Lawrence’s Women in Love (or a kind
of compendium or abridgement of many Lawrence or
Lawrence-like novels or stories). The word nostalgia
breezes eerily across the film’s opening shots, a big
stately home, like Mandalay in Daphne du Maurier’s
novel Rebecca or hosts of other possible period
stately homes which might form a list too long for
this review. The sepia tinted shots of the big house
unfold then into its interiors, a labyrinthine place
with multi-various rooms, halls, landings, all leading
onto further rooms, halls, landings.

Many of the scenes and dialogues seem rather
contrived, as if they had been made with the English
Heritage Industry in mind (ie “Briony your a brick.”
Etc etc. Has anyone ever heard the word brick ever
deployed in such a colloquialism in everyday speech,
or is it simply an empty aristocratic slang made up
for use in these English Heritage Films?) In fact the
script is so shot through with clichés of upper-class
mores and customs that it becomes difficult at times
to take the film at all seriously. In one scene,
after the evacuation of Dunkirk, one of the central
characters, Briony Tallis, manages an act of atonement
(that term infested with shades of meaning from the
Judeo-Christian Tradition) by comforting a young
French soldier in terms of her own Franglais. This
amounts to an exchange of Je suis Ian, Je suis Tallis.
Je habite Paris. Clearly McEwan’s daytrip to Calais
had not been wasted or perhaps this is some lost
version of the Ballymena French so prevalent in this
reviewers Belfast youth.

Atonement says nothing of importance about McEwan’s
novel, or about novels in general, about life in
England, Britain or anywhere, or even, and this
perhaps saddest of all, about films and film-making.
McEwan’s novelistic usage of time lapse and
retrospective is curtailed by the fact that he begins
at the very beginning of the events depicted.
Obviously it all would have been so much more
powerful, but so obviously retrospective, to begin at
the end and work back. Ultimately the ending seems
lame and tacked on as a result. The real film is to
be found at the beginning, when, as a result of the
baneful English class system and conventions of sex
and relationships, Robbie (played by McAvoy) sends a
letter to his loved one Cecila (played by Knightley,
seemingly a model pretending to be an actress) via
their go-between Briony. Predictably Briony reads
this letter, a chain of unfortunate events thus
unfolds, built upon a 13 year-old girls mis-perception
of what is a totally frank letter. In fact she
probably understands that the letter is intended for
her, as so many letters given to other people seem to
be, fails to comprehend her role as a go-between,
insinuating Robbie as the rapist of her cousin Lola.
Robbie goes to gaol but is given remission provided he
joins the army.

The makers of this film have clearly invested quite a
lot in a film of shadows not substance. For all that
the film is convincing, were it not for the
recollection of so many antecedents and influences: in
fact, too many. The scenes set in and around the
Dunkirk evacuation do little to propel the story, seem
tacked on to the film as a Ps, thus providing a
definite sense of identity, historical context.
However, this could easily be left out, seems to serve
as nothing more than an excuse for the cinematographer
and his crew to recreate a period.

In short Atonement is a tired, derivative film with
little to say. There are some definite non-actors in
leading roles, but also some definite actors too.

Paul Murphy, Ealing, London